Kitchen Chronicles

So we are well into our kitchen remodel and enough things have happened that I decided I need to chronicle them. Otherwise, two years from now all the details will have blurred and we (Kathy and I) will enter into another construction project, failing to recall the trauma of the kitchen remodel.

Monday, September 28, 2009

So the cabinets have been in the installation phase for the last week or so, and the floors are being finished sometime in the next couple of days. I've posted a video tour of the cabinets below, though some of them (the island and major wall/pantry cabinet) are being stored temporarily in other parts of the house.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

There hasn't been a lot of action in the kitchen the last couple of weeks. The cabinets are being built--I think they're almost done--and we are trying to zero in on a stain color. In the meantime, the floor is in, though it won't be stained until everything else is done. Here are a couple of floor shots:

The appliances also arrived last week. We put the dishwasher, stove, and microwave in storage in the garage, and the fridge is sitting in our temporary dining room/kitchen. The new fridge is the big-ass stainless steel thing on the right:

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

I realize this post is a bit out of order, chronologically, but I thought it would be good to show the floor plan from the old kitchen along side the plan for the new kitchen. Paul Giesen, friend, neighbor (sort of), and architectural designer extraordinaire, provided these plans.

Old Kitchen

Note that the open walking around space in the old plan (above) is pretty limited, and that the kitchen doesn't really open directly into the dining room.

The new plan (below) shows a much more open floor plan that connects directly into the dining room. The new plan also includes the island,which we hope will be a nice gathering place when cooking or entertaining.

New Kitchen

Even though we got rid of the pantry we still have as much (probably more) storage space in the new plan as we had before. We recouped some of the storage space with the units on the the south wall and with some space under the island. Plus, the cabinets hanging over the counter will be taller than the ones we had before.

Monday, August 10, 2009

The Doug-the-carpenter is currently building our cabinets and has provided some drawings we can share with you before the real things are installed (in a few weeks, I hope). This is the north side of the kitchen, with the refrigerator on the far left in the big empty space:This is the east side, with the stove in the center. The doorway to the front hall and the side view of one of the north wall cabinets are on the far right.This is the view of the south wall, which has the doorway into the dining room. We will have a small counter top on the left side and a floor-to-ceiling unit on the right side.Here are the various views of the cabinets that will be under the island.These plans look great and we can't wait to how great the actual cabinets look!

Sunday, August 9, 2009

We've settled on some selections for granite. Brown Pearl Midnight is going on all of the counters. Hear is a picture of one of the slabs from which we will be cutting (click on it for greater definition):

Azul Palatino is the selection for the island. We don't have a picture of the actual slab but I pulled this one from an online source:

I'm told that the Azul Palatino we'll be using has a bit more color than the one shown here, but that' all lost on me.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

We now have drywall up and are waiting now for the floor to be installed. Doug-the-carpenter came over and took some measurements and is now constructing the cabinets. We're starting to get a sense of what the space will look like. Check it out:

The sink will go under the window and the fridge will be on the far left.

The stove and microwave/hood will be on this wall. The door goes to the front hall and will be open almost always.

Here's the new entrance into the dining room. We'll have some built-ins on both sides of the doorway.

These windows face the backyard and deck. The island will be between the windows and the stove/counter top.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

The wiring, and most of the plumbing, is now in place for the new kitchen. The original wiring was all Knob and Tube, which was pretty much the standard when this house was first wired. The amazing thing is that it looked like almost ever room in the house had wiring running through the kitchen walls; and since we moved a couple of walls, much of it had to be rerouted. Mike, the electrician, came up with a plan for rerouting everything, though Pat, the contractor, says he was the creative genius behind the plan.

It sounds like the plumbing was a little bit complicated as well, but we were in Ireland for ten days and missed all of that. All of the plumbing for the third floor was run up through the laundry chute, next to the old pantry, and some of the radiator pipe ran up through the pantry wall. Since the laundry chute was knocked out with the chimney and pantry, we (they, actually) had to run the plumbing through the ceiling and down through the wall next to the dining room, which is also where a bunch of the wiring had to go. It seems that everything works fine. Time will tell, I suppose. Here are some pics:

This is a shot that shows where the mechanicals that used to live in the laundry chute are now routed through the ceiling.

And here's where all of that stuff meets up with the rerouted knob-and-tube wiring in the wall shared with the dining room.

Here's a shot of a row of outlets along a wall where the stove will live when we're done.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

One of the early surprises was the chimney that used to hide in the wall of the pantry. The surprise was not that it was there--we knew that--but how difficult is was to deal with. I think the initial idea was that it could be removed in the kitchen and then supported--somehow, but I'm not sure how. Anyway, it didn't work out that way. Instead, the chimney had to be taken out from the top--above the roof--down.

Here's Doug starting the job at the top. He's got a fancy system set up to drop bricks into the dumpster.

Here's where all the bricks were supposed to be headed:

Unfortunately, the system broke down and the lads had to fill buckets with bricks and then dump them into the dumpster.

The real drag about taking the chimney out from the roof down is that they had to cut into the walls in the attic (finished suite, for those of you who haven't seen it) and through the office/playroom on the second floor. This was a real dust-generator and we're still cleaning up from it. Here's a picture of the wall cut-out on the second floor:

One of the things you have to do when remodeling a kitchen is set up a temporary kitchen. Some people put it in their basement, but we a have "Dark Shadows" type of basement, so that wasn't going to work for us. Instead, we put it in our dining room:

It's a bit cramped but we've gotten used to it. It actually reminds me of the sort of kitchen/eating spaces I lived with in college (though bigger).